TWA tape ends with loud noise, investigator says

July 26, 1996
Web posted at: 6:10 p.m. EDT

SMITHTOWN, New York (CNN) -- The cockpit voice recorder
aboard TWA Flight 800 ended with a loud, abrupt noise, an
investigator said Friday.

Robert Francis, vice chairman of the National Transportation
Safety Board, told a news conference that analyses of both
the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder
showed no unusual events before the tapes ended suddenly.

"It ends with a loud, abrupt noise on all four channels,"
Francis told reporters. The flight data recorders recovered
from the wreckage Wednesday night were being analyzed by the
NTSB at its laboratory in Washington.

"I haven't heard it ... certainly an exploding engine would
make a loud noise," Francis said.

The abrupt ending and loud noise on the voice recorder
showed that whatever happened on board the New York to Paris
flight came without warning, experts said.

The July 17 explosion and crash killed all 230 people on
board. Investigators are considering mechanical failure, a
bomb or a missile as possible causes for the Boeing 747
disaster.

Recovery teams searching the
Atlantic off Long Island have found two of four engines from
TWA Flight 800, National Transportation Safety Board Vice Chairman Robert Francis said Friday.

"We've located two engines. Engines, when you are looking at an aircraft accident, are extremely important," he said.

Francis said they were found in the main debris field and that the vessels capable of lifting the 7,000- to 9,000-pound engines to the surface would be sent to the area. He said he did not know what condition the engines were in.

Experts said whether the engines are found close together or scattered can be an indication of what caused the plane to crash. Investigators will try to determine if the engines suffered a
power failure or if there was an explosion in the engines
which could have caused the crash.

Francis describes what the search is like for divers

Earlier Friday, Francis said investigators still
don't know what caused the crash, despite initial analysis of
tapes from the plane's cockpit voice and flight data
recorders.

Asked if investigators were now ready to say the Paris-bound
Boeing 747 was brought down by a bomb, Francis told CNN, "Not
any of the investigators I've been talking to."

At a briefing Thursday, Francis said a brief "fraction-of-a-
second" sound was recorded just before the tape stopped in
the cockpit voice recorder but water damage to the flight
data recorder means it will be tougher to get information
from that box.

"All four CVR channels recorded a brief fraction-of-a-second
sound just prior to the end of the tape," Francis said. "The
recording indicated a routine pre-flight, takeoff and
departure from JFK International. About 11-and-one-half
minutes after takeoff, the recording ended abruptly."

On Friday, Francis said a number of reasons other than an
explosion could have interrupted the communication.

"A wire being cut for some reason, a loss of power," Francis
said. "There are obviously a number of ways you can lose a
connection between a source and something driven by
electricity."

He said investigators would continue to analyze the sound and
would begin running comparisons between the tapes from the
two voice and data recorders in an attempt to learn more
about the cause of the crash.

Both the recorders, known as "black boxes" even though
they're orange, were located late Wednesday night beneath the
USS Grasp, the primary Navy search ship. Divers recovered
them early Thursday.